M3GAN

I’m not gonna beat around the bush here with preamble and metaphor. Mthreegan doesn’t deserve the effort. It’s a bore. A labored, muddled, uninspired bore. Whatever attempts at comedy and camp never even come close to landing, and those attempts are exceedingly rare to begin with. This is mostly a schlocky, paint by numbers movie that thinks it’s making smart commentary on something, but is really sleepwalking through the motions of doing the bare minimum to be watchable. Every plot development is more obvious than a white whale on a black background, it forces characters to act in a way to facilitate the plot rather than what would be normal and natural, and the movie drags out the set-up for so long without actually building any interest in the characters, so that when they’re in jeopardy, it’s impossible to care. The unrated version has some good gore effects, and Amie Donald, who plays Mthreegan, does a good job capturing the uncanny valley movements of a near-alive android. But it’s all in service of a movie that never rises above the elevator pitch of “what if Small Wonder was evil”. Inoffensive and inconsequential.